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Suu Kyi is free, but Myanmar’s problems are many

Myanmar still faces many problems along the path to democracy. | Reuters

By JOEL BRINKLEY | 10/9/12 11:12 PM EDT

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar opposition leader and former political prisoner, just completed a tour of the United States, where she was treated with sycophantic adoration, almost as if she were Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Václav Havel, all wrapped in one svelte Asian woman.

As Myanmar, also known as Burma, opens and begins to democratize, she is the nation’s new ambassador to the world. She’s suddenly free to travel after decades of oppression and house arrest. At the San Francisco Freedom Forum, a human-rights conference late last month, one activist after another lauded her.

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“She’s a role model for me,” enthused Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi women’s advocate.

“Many of us in Africa can relate to her troubles and her struggles,” said George Ayittey, founder of the Free Africa Foundation. And Russian dissident and chess master Garry Kasparov proclaimed: “Aung San Suu Kyi has the ability to inspire all of us and motivates us to continue that fight.”

In Washington a short time earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Suu Kyi that the United States had been “eagerly awaiting your welcome because there was so much excitement and enthusiasm about the fact that you can actually come.”

But all this idolization brings with it a possible down side — a widespread expectation in the West that if Suu Kyi, 67, is free to travel and talk, all must be right with the political transition in Myanmar. But it isn’t.

“People love a martyr and a living saint,” said Maureen Aung-Thwin, a Burmese who directs the Open Society’s Burma/Southeast Asia program. “But people who don’t know the complexities of the situation look at her and think: ‘Oh, look. Here’s a happy ending.’ But the ending isn’t there yet.”

Myanmar, she adds, seems to be undergoing “a slight, nascent democratization. But in terms of solidifying institutions and rule of law, almost nothing” has been done.

Nonetheless, following a request from Suu Kyi and Thein Sein, the nation’s president, Washington dropped its last significant trade sanctions against Myanmar last month. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have opened offices there, and several Western nations, including the U.S., are announcing significant increases in aid.

This spring, the U.S. appointed its first ambassador there in 22 years. At the same time, Japan waived $3.7 billion in unpaid debt, while Coca-Cola and Pepsi are opening shop there.

Myanmar experts acknowledge that a roughly similar case almost 10 years ago seems relevant now. In 2004, Ukrainians staged a popular uprising. They demanded and won new elections to overturn the fraudulent vote that had elected Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich as president. He was widely regarded as a stooge of Moscow. The popular, pro-Western opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, took his place.

Washington lauded the change. Back in Kiev, however, Yushchenko found himself at the head of a government with no functional democratic institutions, no effective agencies that would allow him to reform the education system, health care or other government services. None of that had been needed in a Soviet-era autocratic regime.

The government quickly descended into confusion, chaos and perpetual political imbroglios. So in the next election, Yanukovich came back to power. He remains Ukraine’s leader today.